Do you know the difference between Sales & Marketing?

I've been asked a lot of questions about these two concepts over the past few years...

In fact, the two divisions seem to be bundled together more often than not...

· sales,Marketing,Small Business

So, what's the difference?

It's not an easy distinction, but it is important.

It matters because as a business owner or as a sales rep, if you're counting on marketing to bring your sales to your door, you're totally screwed. Pardon the language. If you don't know what the difference between marketing and sales is, your business or your livelihood is in serious danger. Marketing is usually supposed to do one of two things: spread brand awareness or generate leads.

Sales is the whole shebang! A good salesman can both generate his or her own leads and close them once they are generated. Good sales training should not only teach you how to close the leads, but also where to go to find them and how to create qualified leads out of the masses.

Sales is the whole shebang!

So why even market? That’s a great question! And my rule of thumb is that unless you’re experiencing more than 5% profit or more than $100k in revenue, you probably shouldn’t be looking to market, especially not to generate leads. It’s not a crutch to be used to supplement poor sales skills. If you can sell, you can get yourself up above $100k revenue pretty easily. Focus on that.

My recommendations for marketing are two-fold. If you find yourself needing to develop a brand – i.e. you need people to recognize your company name.

Perhaps you’re more expensive, or better quality than your competition and you need people to understand that (which usually comes with knowing who you are ahead of time). Alternatively, if you have a sales team that is closing well above industry average and it’s a waste of their time to send them looking for their own leads, then you should market to generate leads.

I can almost guarantee that 95% of the people reading this newsletter are not in a position to be marketing their business. Focus on sales. When you have money to burn, then you can focus on marketing and branding experts. Until then, sell, sell, sell.

Want to accelerate your sales? Check out www.SchellerUniversity.com

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